29 April 2016

“The Slavs and the Avars” — Omelian Pritsak

This is a very original paper by Omelian Pritsak (1919–2006), the prominent scholar of Ukrainian and Turkic studies. He was a historian and linguist. Dr. Pritsak was fluent in a dozen languages. The following article on the mainly Turkic-speaking Avars of Hunnic origin was first published in an obscure and hard-to-access proceedings by the Italian Center for Medieval Studies in Spoleto, Italy. Fortunately, it was in English. It also covers other Hunnic-Turkic groups, such as Bulgars, Onogurs, Kutrigurs, Utigurs, and Khazars. A short discussion of the subject with Dr. Pritsak follows the very-long and detailed article.

There is [a] general agreement
among western scholars that the Avars were instrumental in the appearance of
Slavs on the stage of history.[1]
As the Huns caused the Germanic peoples (along with the Iranian Alans) to migrate
and to develop new political groups, so—a familiar thesis runs—it was the Avars
who caused the Slavs to move and to develop. Yet, the Avars have remained, so
to speak, stepchildren in historical studies, and the raison d'être of their activities has hardly been explored.[2]

Since World War II,
archeological research on Avar sites, especially in Hungary and Slovakia, but
also other Slavic countries, has developed rapidly. The state-sponsored
academic institutions have been conducting excavations on a large scale
according to well-prepared plans, and reports on the new materials are
published almost immediately. Specialists have been sifting the old and new
data collected from sites in territories once under Avar domination, in an
effort to puzzle out the ethnic, economic, and social structure of the Avar
realm. In this way, it is the archeologists who have taken the study of the
Avars into their hands.[3]
The conjectures of the Slavic scholars usually overrate the roles of Slavs in
Avar society,[4]
while the Hungarians tend to go to the other extreme. There are two reasons for
this. The first is the paucity of written sources on the Avars. Although the
Avars were a successful imperial elite, they apparently were, like their
predecessors, illiterate.[5]
All succeeding Eurasian rulers used some sort of writing system and recorded at
least a few historical messages.[6]
The Avars, however, left no written records about their goals or achievements.
The second reason is that scholars studying the Avars have not exploited fully
the multilingual and heterogeneous sources for the history of the Eurasian
steppe, since it is very difficult to combine experience in both western and
eastern philologies in order to put together, for the first time, a historical
perspective of the nomadic steppe empires.[7]

In this paper, I will try
only to take a fresh look, through the perspective of Eurasian and general
history, at the Avars in their relationship to the Slavs. Let us first deal, if
only briefly, with the vexed question as to whether the European Avars were
identical with the East Asian Jou-jan of Chinese sources.[8]
Chinese official historiography of the ancient and early medieval period used
two generic designations for «barbarians» to the northwest: Hsiung-nu and Tung
Hu. The Tung Hu or «Eastern barbarians» were known from the third century B.C.E.,
and later developed two branches: the Wu-huan, first mentioned in 78 B.C.E.,
and the Hsien-pi, documented from 45 C.E. Chinese historical phonology, which
is now a precise and reliable discipline,[9]
allows us to reconstruct the ancient pronunciation of the two designations:
these are *ahwar (= Avar) for the Wu-huan, and *säbir, säbär
(> Sibir, hence Siberia) for the Hsien-pi.[10]

The leading clans of both the
Jou-jan in the steppe and the Tabgach (T’o-pa) Wei dynasty in China (386–457)
originated from the Hsien-pi and both used a Proto-Mongolian language as their lingua
franca.[11]
The European Avars were not directly connected with the real Avars, but, as
contemporary Byzantine sources clearly state, consciously imitated them,
especially by copying the way they plaited their hair,[12]
in order to gain for themselves the prestige the true Avars, the Wu-huan of
Chinese sources, had enjoyed among the steppe peoples. It is also clear, especially
from the Byzantine data, that these Pseudo-Avars were of Hunnic origin, the
Vär-Hunni (Οὐάρ
Χουννί);[13]
I will return to this topic below. It is this group, which will henceforth be
called simply Avars in this paper, that is important for the history of Europe.
They have nothing to do with the Asian Jou-jan.[14]

2.

There were two kinds of «nomads»:
those of the steppe and those of the sea.

The Avar realm in Europe was
one in a sequence of Eurasian steppe «nomadic» empires, which had a series of
fundamental traits in common.[15]
Let us examine the general structure of such an empire, for which I use the
term pax, reserving empire to refer to sedentary
societies. The pax was the creation
of the bearers of a steppe warrior religion («Männerbünde,» «Royal Hordes»)
characterized by specific notions to which we will return.

The idea of rule by professional
warrior and merchant elites emerged on the territory of present-day Mongolia
about 900 B.C.E., probably among Indoeuropeans (Iranians, Tocharians). Some
five hundred years later, the idea was taken over by the Altaic-speaking
peoples, who made use of it for almost two millenia. The first to do so were
the Hsiung-nu who competed with the Tung Hu or Eastern Barbarians, especially
the Hsien-pi or Säbir subdivision.

A special characteristic of
the pax was a lack of linear
thinking, of the concept of linear development. Time and events were viewed as
cyclic. A particular clan could acquire charisma, rise to power, and rule for a
certain period, only to be swept away by another group. Whenever a charismatic
clan lost charisma, not only its ruling position, but also its name and
language were replaced by those of the victorious clan. This does not mean that
all the people immediately shifted from one language to another, only that
their allegiance changed, and with it the relative prestige of different
languages. As soon as one cycle was completed, another followed, in a round of
events preconditioned by the society’s non-linear, cyclical thinking.

The territory of the pax was also exchangeable; what was
indispensable was that the rulers have people who would follow their lead. For
the territory itself, there were only two requirements: first, that it was
located along an important commercial route, and second, that it was close
enough to a sedentary empire to tap its economy by periodical raids, yet
distant enough to allow the warriors to disappear into marshes, sands, or
forests. Thus, for example, warriors from Mongolia could easily cross the
familiar deserts to raid China more or less at will, but the Chinese found it
almost impossible to trace the enemy through the wilderness to the inner stronghold.
The sea nomads based, e.g., on the islands of Denmark, could thread their way
through dangerous passages to mount a raid against any coastal settlement, but
the people they attacked would have the greatest difficulty in following them
back to their base.

In consequence, the territory
of the pax was divided into inner
and outer areas, each with its own administration, troops, and offices,
so that every function existed in pairs, inner and outer.

The inner area, such as the
sandy desert of the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia, was the place where the
religious and imperial sanctuaries were found. From the time of the T’u-chüe Pax, 550–744, on, the sanctuaries were
also decorated with dynastic inscriptions. Here the annual rites and ceremonies
of the Tängri religion were held. The inner area, moreover, served as the
training ground for new military recruits. The outer area for any pax was the frontier (limes) of the empire of the time
(China, Iran, Rome), where the nomads could station garrison-type military
units, specially trained for local conditions.

This area was of crucial
importance for the pax, since it was
where contacts were made with the civilization, culture and, above all, the
economy of the sedentary empire. This contact-area is also a focal point for
the historian, since it was only there that the non-historical steppe polities
entered the stream of history.

At the time and place of
concern to us—sixth century Europe—the outer area was the Roman (Byzantine) Danube
Limes and the Frankish
Saale-Elbe frontier: therefore, it is events on these territories that will
occupy our attention.

The charismatic clans
themselves were not pastoralists, but professional warriors, ideologists and
leaders.[16]
Before coming to power, their members usually lived in towns,[17]
where they gathered knowledge about economic, geographic, and political affairs
and conditions. They maintained close ties with the international merchants,
and often served them as guards in their emporia. The (itinerant) merchants, on
their part, were interested in the ongoing existence of a pax which could insure peaceful conduct of their business affairs.
During the intermezzo between two cycles of ruler-clans, the merchants would
search for a suitable new ruler. When they found one, they would supply him
with money, arms, and provisions. Once the pax
was established, the merchants would function within it as an organized body of
tax-farmers and duty-free traders.

The ambitious leader of a
suitable clan who wished to become the ruler of a pax first had to gather together a retinue of the Germanic comitatus type,
that is of professional warriors who were personally selected by the leader
and, therefore, owed him special allegiance. The new pretender, having established
such a retinue (in Old Turkic buyruq, in Hunnic boylar), would
set out to win decisive victories, in order to attract attention. If he was
successful, adventurers from far and wide would flock to him in expectation of
sharing in an El Dorado. The territorial center of nomadic society, e.g.
Mongolia (n. of the steppe), or the islands of Denmark (n. of the sea) would be
flooded with newcomers. There, in what Jordanes called officina gentium,[18]
the recruits would undergo a period of training before riding out in successive
waves that often resulted in a migration of peoples.

The new leader’s next step
would be to find cohorts among the leaders of other charismatic clans or
important pastoralist tribes. A system of intermarriages would develop of
necessity, because in the steppe exogamy prevailed. With the help of his new
partners, the steppe ruler would take control, either by force or by
persuasion, of the human resources needed to assure a steady supply of military
recruits and revenues for the upkeep of the army and administration. For a
nascent steppe pax, the ideal sources
were the pastoralist tribes and then the hunting tribes, because of their
mobility and expertise with weapons. However, if the territories were unsuited
for pastoralism, especially in the outer area (limes), other arrangements could be substituted. Chief among them
were the system of military settlements (of the type of the later Russian Kazak
settlements) and the military slavery system like that practiced in Egypt and
Syria during the Mamlūk era, or the Ottoman qulluq system, or some
combination of these arrangements appropriate to the situation.[19]

Foreign administrative
expertise was also required. Usually, suitable experts were found among
defectors or individuals kidnapped from the sedentary societies.

The most powerful tactical
military unit employed in the steppe was a tümän, or a 10,000 man unit,
usually of cavalry. Each household, that is five to seven people, was expected
to provide two or three adult males, over twelve years old. The territory of
the pax was divided into military-political
districts called «arrows» (Old Turkic oq, pl. oġəz, later -ġuz,
Hunnic pl. oġur, later -ġur)
based on the capacity of its population to supply the ten thousand men
necessary for a tümän. In practice, this required that a large ethnic
tribe be subdivided, or that several smaller ethnic units or tribes be joined
into one military «arrow.» For the oq-system to function, the apolitical
anthropological tribe (Old Turkic oqsəz) had to acquire appropriate
military training and political indoctrination. Camaraderie and uniform
military training brought about linguistic assimilation; first, dialectal differences
among men of a tümän would fade, and then the emerging lingua franca
of the pax would take the place of
other languages still used among the specific tribes. The prestige of the
warrior, whether on duty or in retirement, prompted the rest of the population
to imitate his speech. The Turkic pax
was established in Mongolia in 550; by 576, it already reached as far west as
Tamatarcha (later T'’mutorokan') at the Kerch Straits. However, it was some
time before a supratribal Turkic medium of communication could develop. At
first, the official chancery used East Iranian Sogdian, as witnessed by the
newly discovered Bugut inscription from about 580.[20]
We know Old Turkic written texts from no earlier than about 700, give or take a
couple of decades.[21]
Their language, the oldest version of Turkic, was already without important
dialectal differences; there is no trace of dialectal peculiarities that must
have existed before this period of a Turkic lingua
franca. Not until after the dissolution of the Turkophone pax in 845 did separate Turkic languages
and dialects begin to emerge. This is a situation comparable to the emergence
of the Romance languages after the fall of the Roman Empire, which had used
Latin as both its lingua franca and
its chief medium for cultural expression.[22]

During the period between the
fifth and tenth centuries, the Eurasian steppe was the home of two main pastoralist
groups, probably of heterogeneous origin. When they were organized into the frameworks
of paxes, two linguae francae developed, one Turkic and used in the east, the other
Hunnic and used by the western group. This is reflected in the recorded names
of some of the groups. In the names of the political tribal groups—usually
organized in two wings, left and right—the numerals 5, 9, 10 and 30 occur. The
corresponding Hunnic words were *bīl (later bŭl) '5' (Turkic bēš),
*qutur '9' (Tu. toqəz), *onno '10' (Tu. ōn) and *utur
'30' (Tu. otəz). Therefore, the Old Turkic runic inscriptions from
Mongolia mention tribal groups such as the Toqəz Oġəz and On Oq,[23]
and characterize them as either loyal members of the Türküt-led confederation
or as rebels striving for independence, sometimes (the greatest sin) in
cooperation with China. At the same time, the Western, mainly Byzantine,
sources often mention the Onnoġur, Quturġur, and Uturġur[24]
as unruly members of both the (Proto-)Bulgar and the Avar confederations. I mentioned
earlier that the paxes usually
employed special garrison troops along their frontiers, that is in the outer
zone. They too were structured in groups, whereby the same numbers were used in
their names as in the «arrows.» While the Chinese sources contain such
designations as Chiu-hsing Hu, «The Nine Tribes of the Iranian [military
settlers],»[25]
the Byzantine sources mention «the Seven Tribes» of the so-called Sklavins[26]
within the pax led by the Proto-Bulgars.

Therefore, we must take into
account that ‘tribe’ may, in these sources, in fact mean oq, thus a
military rather than an ethnic designation.

3.

Shortly after 450, the
Chinese Wei dynasty (the T’o-pa, Tabgach, of Proto-Mongolian origin) put an end
to the state of Pei-Liang, the last of the Hunnic commercial centers created by
the Hsiung-nu on Chinese territory, in the economically vital province of
Kan-su. Some of the defeated ruling clans managed to flee to the distant
Hsiung-nu successor state near Lake Balkash, an area known as Yüe-pan in
the Chinese sources,[27]
reflecting *ör-pän as the old pronunciation.[28]
This same designation also occurs in the Old Turkic Bilgä Qagan inscription of
732 (II E 20).[29]

A century later, the Turks (T'’u-chüe)
proclaimed their pax in Eurasia
(550), and some of the young people of the Örpän-Hunnic group, to the number of
about twenty thousand (two tümäns), fled to the European frontiers of
the Byzantine empire. Theophylact Simocattes (fl. 610–641) called them,
properly, Οὐάρ Ouar (= *ör
> vär) and Χουννί Chounni, but he also wrote
that these refugees pretended to be the true Avars, because of the latter’s
authority among the steppe peoples.[30]
Among the first to submit to the Pseudo-Avars were the Iranian merchant clan of
Warāz/Barč (Βαρςήλτ),[31]
the Hunnic Onnoġurs (Οὐννουγοὺροι), and the
Proto-Mongolian Säbirs (Hsien-pi = Σάβιροι).[32]
The victorious refugees established themselves in the Northern Caucasus, near
the Byzantine holdings in the Crimea. In 558, through the good services of the
Alan ruler, they established relations with the Byzantines and soon were
granted the status of foederati on Byzantine territory in Scythia Minor,
that is, Dobrudja.[33]

We have now arrived at the
non-controversial stage in Avar (Pseudo-Avar) history, for the newcomers from
Asia, having established their «outer territory» on the Roman Danube limes, had become involved in their colorful
relationship with the historically-minded Byzantines and their activities are
fairly clearly recorded. Let us, therefore, turn to the Slavic side of the
issue.

II.

1.

The name «Slav» appears in the
Byzantine cultural sphere shortly after 550 in works written in Greek, Syriac,
and Latin by both professional and amateur historians.

It refers to a new group of barbarian
warriors roaming to the north of the Danube limes,
approximately from Sirmium to the Danube delta, and frequently crossing into
Byzantine territory.

Two professional historians dealing
with contemporary matters, the secular author Procopius (d. ca. 572) who wrote in Greek, and Bishop
John of Ephesus (d. 586) who wrote in Syriac,[34]
spoke of a new group of barbarians called Σκλαβην-οι or 'sqlwyn-w (esqlawin-ū).

Both in Procopius’ «History of the
Wars» and «Anecdota,» the Σκλαβηνοι are first mentioned
under the year 531, at the beginning of the rule of Emperor Justinian I
(527–565).[35]
They appear along with two other groups of barbarians in two orders:

An amateur, or at least
unsystematic historian, who wrote in Latin rather than in Greek, was Jordanes
from Moesia, a pro-Roman Ostrogoth. In 551, he wrote two works, probably in
Ravenna: a gesta-type of barbarian «national» story under the title «De
origine actibusque Getarum» (commonly referred to as «Getica»), and an outline
of Roman history known as «Romana.» He ended the latter work with a statement
that his goal had been to relate Roman history proper and not to digress to
discuss the activities of three latter-day groups of barbarians, whom he lists
in the same order as Procopius did in his «History»: Bulgares, Antes,
Sćlaveni.[39]
This means that Jordanes was the first to identify the Bulgars correctly as
Huns; it shows him as a reliable observer of contemporary events and
relationships.

The professional historians of the time
mentioned the barbarians only in connection with events along the Danube limes. Jordanes, however, is praised by
modern scholarship for providing detailed topographical data about otherwise
unknown regions that confirm a tripartite division of the Slavs at that time.
His information has been considered invaluable, and has been viewed as a solid
basis for classifying the ethnic and linguistic groups of Slavs of the
mid-sixth century in the following way:

Unfortunately, this locus classicus
for Slavic history and historical philology has never been subjected to
critical analysis. Nineteenth-century scholars found the tripartite division of
the Slavs into Southern, Eastern, and Western groups self-evident, natural, and
probably, therefore, ancient. Jordanes was, therefore, read as confirming the
obvious, and the quotation passed from book to book.[41]
Slavists have been so pleased that a mid-sixth century author provided apparently
unambiguous insider’s information about the northern barbarians of his time
that they failed to scrutinize the text with the rigor that good scholarly
method requires.

3.

According to Jordanes’ own
words, section 119 is merely a recapitulation of the catalogue of tribes he had
already presented in sections 34 and 35. Therefore, there is no reason to
regard it as a self-sufficient contemporary statement about three branches of
the Slavic people. We need, rather, to look closely at the two earlier, introductory
passages in Jordanes.

4.

It is important to understand
Jordanes’ aims and the structure of the introductory part of his «Getica.»

Jordanes, let me repeat, was
not a fully professional historian. His work is poorly organized. Not only can
we see various seams where he has patched together information from different
sources, but the basic exposition is full of insertions, digressions and
associations.

Jordanes, as he tells us in
his introduction, used four types of sources, three of them not known from
other surviving writings. His major source was the twelve-book «Historica
Gothica» by the Roman senator Cassiodorus (490–585), which has survived only in
Jordanes’ meager abridgement. Second was the lost Gothic history by the
otherwise unknown Ablavius (descriptor Gothorum gentis, § 28), which
Jordanes used for information about events of the second and third centuries,
C.E., and third was Gothic popular tradition. His fourth source was works by
Greek and Roman authors, both classical (pagan) and Christian; here we can
check to see how he used them.

Jordanes’ identifications of
places and peoples are often innacurate. From the beginning, he equated his
main heroes, the Germanic Goths, with the ancient Getae, a people said to be of
Thracian origin, akin to the Daci. This association led him to posit as the
second habitat of the Goths the area which was, in fact, the land of the Getae,
namely Moesia, Thracia and Dacia. This confusion probably was fostered by the
fact that the Ostrogoths, although at a much later time (433–471), had lived in
Roman Pannonia as foederati of the empire.

Jordanes then mingled the
Gothic popular traditions with classical sources about the Getae, and thus was
able to view the Gothic kings as companions to Getic philosophers who were
known from Greek literature. With this approach, Jordanes envisioned a high
cultural niveau for his ancestors. But in «restoring» the alleged Getic past of
the Goths, Jordanes made several chronological blunders, especially in his
catalogue of learned Getae. Thus, he fused a Zeuta who was alive in 424 B.C.E.
with another who died in 383 B.C.E. into a putative Zeuta he pictured as a
contemporary of Dicineus (whom Strabo places in the first century B.C.E.) and
presents the two as predecessors of Zalmoxis, a learned Getic slave of
Pythagoras. But that famous Greek philosopher belonged to a much earlier
period, about 530 B.C.E.[42]

An assiduous reader, Jordanes
picked up names from different sources without realizing just what they referred
to. For instance, in his list of Greek colonies on the northern shores of the Black
Sea, he equates Olbia, located on the Borysthenes River (i.e., the Dnieper),
with a «Borysthenide» (§ 32), which simply did not exist.[43]
The Dniester becomes two separate rivers, «Tyra, Danaster» (§ 30). The Olt, an
important tributary of the Danube, is once called Aluta (§ 30) but reappears as
flu[men] Tausis (§ 136).[44]
Jordanes’ knowledge of the geography of the regions beyond the Mediterranean
was not always accurate; his list of Greek colonies on the northern shores of
the Black Sea included the Anatolian trading center of Trebizond (§ 32); he was
probably misled by the existence of the Crimean mountain range with a similar
name.[45]
It is clear that Jordanes must have misinterpreted his written sources. For
instance, the «Chorography» of Pomponius Mela (fl. 44 C.E.) contains the
river name Hypanis (Boh, Southern Bug) and the tribal name Callipidi;[46]
Jordanes records both as names of alleged Black Sea cities (§§ 32, 46).

Jordanes was inconsistent even in
dealing with the names for the Danube. Although he was clearly aware that the
names Ister and Danubius referred to one river (§§ 32, 75, 114), he still uses
Ister in its original Thracian sense, i.e., to designate the Danube from the
confluence of the Sava and Tisza to the Black Sea (§§ 30, 33). Not uncommonly,
Jordanes, compiling information from different sources, places names side by
side and sometimes uses several variants of the same name interchangeably,
e.g., Vistula and Viscla; Mursianus lacus and Morsianus
stagnus; Alani, Halani and Spali;[47]Sadagarii and Sadagis; Araxes and Abraxes, and the
like.

5.

A full critical analysis of
the «Gethica» as a source would be out of place here, but it is important to
look carefully at the first thirty-eight paragraphs in order to place the locus
classicus concerning the Slavs in the context of the larger system, such as
it is. Here is an outline, with some comments:

1) Author’s preface (§§ 1–3),
which is irrelevant for the present analysis.

2) Division of the earth into a
tripartite continent (Asia, Europe, Africa) and an ocean with islands; here Jordanes
acknowledges the authority of Paulus Orosius (ca. 380–420) as a source (§ 4).

4) Topography and geography of the
island of Skandza. Following Ptolemy, Jordanes locates it opposite the Vistula
river. He quotes Pomponius Mela and Ptolemy (§§ 16–19).

5) Anthropological data on Skandza. The
only source Jordanes quotes here is Ptolemy, Geogr. II.11.33–35. But while Ptolemy knew of only seven Scandinavian
peoples, Jordanes presents fresh and correct information which must come from
Ablavius or oral tradition or both: his list contains about thirty Old
Scandinavian tribal groups (§§ 20–24a).

6) Digression about the fate of the
king of Heruli, Roduulf (d. 494), which was apparently taken from the «History»
of Procopius or a common source (§ 24 bis).[48]

7) Very important and highly
original is Jordanes’ historiosophical concept of officina gentium ‘the
factory of tribes’ and vagina nationum ‘the vagina of bands’ (i.e., the
starting point for the planned migration of nomads of the sea) and its
identification with Skandinavia (Skandza). The story of the initial migration
of the first Gothic king, Berig, to the Vistula Delta (Gothiscandza), is
apparently taken from oral tradition (§§ 25–26).

8) Next follows the migration
of Filimer (the fifth successor of Berig) to the northern shores of the Black
Sea, in Gothic called Oium (lit. «bei den Auen,» i.e., «Mesopotamia»),
that is, the curved shores between the Dniester and the Dnieper, and his
victorious encounter with the [Alanic] Spali. Ablavius is named as an
authoritative source, but epic songs were probably also used (§§ 26 bis–28).
The author also polemicizes with Josephus Flavius (37–95) about the relations
between the Goths, the Scythians, and the biblical figure of Magog (§ 29).[49]

9) The topographical and
geographical description of Scythia that follows (§§ 30–38) requires more
detailed treatment. Here, one must keep in mind that Jordanes’ goal was to set
down the history of the Goths; Scythia and its geography were of interest to
him only because the Goths once lived there, after they had left the island of
Skandza. It is important as a major stop during the long journey of the Goths.
What Jordanes wanted to do first was to present the frontiers of Scythia as
clearly as possible. Therefore, he delineated points of orientation first as
viewed from the south (as did classical maps and both Christian and Arabic
early medieval maps) and then from the northern perspective. From time to time,
he inserted associations, digressions, and glosses, but his data are always
primarily concerned with Gothic affairs.

We must also keep in mind the
relative chronology of major events in Gothic history, which Jordanes sets up
(§ 38):

a) Preparatory migration from Skandza to Gothiskandza;

b) The migration to the Ukrainian Mesopotamia (Oium);

c) The shift to the commercially important region around
the Azov Sea (iuxta Paludum Meotidem), which he called the «first
habitat» of the Goths;

d) Moesia [I and II], Thracia, and Dacia as the «second
habitat» of the Goths (grouping together the classical Getae and the early
medieval Ostrogoths, 433–471);

e) The «third habitat» of the Ostrogoths (the empire of
Hermanarich, d. 375, and his successors until 433), placed again in the
Ukrainian Mesopotamia between the Dniester and the Dnieper.

6.

Jordanes did not follow Ptolemy who had
replaced Herodotus’ concept of Scythia with the «modern» one of Sarmacia.
He kept the name Scythia, but, like Strabo (63 B.C.E.–23 C.E.)[50]
and Pliny the Younger (23–79),[51]
extended its western frontiers as far as Germania.[52]

Jordanes’ treatment of the
frontier of Scythia is extremely important for resolving the issue we are
concerned with. Therefore, our analysis must be scrupulous. Let me repeat that
Jordanes gave two sets of orientations, one from the southern perspective and
the other from the northern perspective.

I. The western frontier of
Scythia, i.e., the frontier between Scythia and Germania:

A. In the south:

a) the «birthplace» of the Ister river (ubi Ister
oritur amnis, § 30). Accepting the views of Pliny,[53]
who regarded Illyricum as the place where the river Danubius ended and the
river Ister began, Jordanes pinpointed the birthplace of the Ister at the
confluence of the Danube with the Tisza (north) and the Sava (south). Three
important Roman frontier cities were located there: Sirmium (Mitrovica),
Singidunum (Belgrade), and Novae (Euscia).[54]

b)Stagnus Morsianus (§ 30), which Jordanes
elsewhere calls Lacus Mursianus (§ 35), is surely the Neusiedler Lake in
Austria;[55]
Jordanes chose it, because it was a clear marker of the northwestern end of the
Roman province of Pannonia.

B. In the north: the delta of
the Vistula River (§ 30).

II. The eastern frontier.
Scythia extended eastward to the land of the Seres (China) and its northernmost
boundary was the Ocean (Oceanus, § 31).

A. From the southern
perspective, from east to west:

a) Persia, Albania, Hiberia (Iberia, Caucasian Georgia).

b) Pontus (Black Sea) and Ister (Danube, § 32).

B. From the northern
perspective:

a) Caspian Sea (Mare
Caspium), which Jordanes, following Eratosthenes, describes as being shaped
like a mushroom (§ 30).[56]

b) The lands of the
(historical) Hunni, the Albani, and the Seres (from west to east; § 30).

Jordanes’ Scythia was divided
by the Riphaean Mountains (a mythical range he took over from Eratosthenes,
Ptolemy, and other ancient authorities)[57]
into European and Asian parts; the frontier was the river Tanais (Don), emptying
into the Maeotis (§ 32).

In the European part of
Scythia, where the Goths lived, there were the rivers Tiras, Danaster (both
names for the Dniester), Vagosola (probably the Boh),[58]
and Danaper (the Dnieper),[59]
as well as the Taurus Moutains (on the Crimea), which the author—this
time—clearly differentiates from the Anatolian range of similar name (§ 30).
Whereas the name Danaster for old Tiras was first introduced by Ammianus
Marcellinus (ca. 330–393),[60]
Jordanes is to be credited with the first use of Danaper/Dnieper, the «local»
name for the ancient Boristhenus (quem accolae Danaprum vocant, § 44).
The name Vagosola is a hapax and remains enigmatic.

Maeotis, the Azov Sea—so important in
Jordanes’ vision of Gothic history—is mentioned several times, usually in
connection with the Thanais (Don), Bosporus (Kerch Strait), Caucasian
Mountains, and the Araxes River in Transcaucasia (§§ 30, 32, 44, etc).

To stress the importance of Gothic
Scythia, Jordanes inserted a list of Greek colonies of the polis type on the
northern shores of the Black Sea. Some were real (Olbia, Cherson, Theodosia, Myrmician)
and some fictional (Boristhenide, Callipolida, Careon); he also mistakenly
included the famous Anatolian trade center of Trebizond here (§ 32).

7.

10) Anthropological description of
Scythia (§ § 33–37).

This material is presented along the
same lines as the geographical description and must be analyzed in reference to
it.

Jordanes again began with the
western frontier from the southern perspective. The first people he named were
naturally the Germanic Gepidae (§ 33) who from about 269 until after his own
time (567) lived in Dacia (Pannonia). He described their habitat as being where
the river Tisia (Tisza) embraces the land from the north and west, the river
Tausis (Olut/Aluta) from the east, and the river Ister from the south (§ 33).
Dacia is presented as having the shape of a crown, enveloped by the Alps
(Carpathians: § 34).

In recent times, from
Jordanes’ point of view, i.e., during the first decades of the sixth century,
another race had emerged—the Sclaveni. Their habitat he described as a
territory between the city of Novietunum and the lake of Mursia. The latter, as
I said above, has been identified as the Neusiedler Lake. The context shows that
Novietunum cannot be the same as Novodunum/-Noviodunum on the lower Danube,
near modern Isaccea/Isakča, as Elena Č. Skržinskaja has pointed out.[61]
The territory Jordanes describes is at the source of the Ister/Danube, not its
mouth. But neither can Novietunum be equated with Noviodunum (modern Dernovo)
on the Sava River near Ljubljana, as Skržinskaja would have it. Emona
(Ljubljana) was not located in any of the three Roman Danube frontier
provinces—Moesia (which he mentions first), Thracia and Dacia—connected with
the history of the Goths, termed by Jordanes the «second Gothic habitat» and
indeed the historical home of the Ostrogoths between 433 and 471.[62]
Since Jordanes was concerned precisely with the Gothic past, he had no reason
to use Emona as a point of orientation. Moesia (= Pannonia) was where his
immediate ancestors came from, and, as I have said, it was in this province
that the three Roman centers on the Danube limes
were situated: Sirmium, Singidunum, and Novae. Therefore, we must look for a
town in Moesia that could have been a suitable reference point. The easternmost
Moesian stronghold (established, no doubt, to hold the frontier) was Novae
(also called Euscia; today the village of Golubac),[63]
which Jordanes mentioned elsewhere (§ 101). I stressed above that Jordanes
often used two or more variants of a geographic name. Novae can be
interpreted as the Latin abbreviation of the original Celtic name, and tunum
is a Germanic variant of the Celtic dunom ‘city.’ I suggest, then, that
Jordanes's Novietunum is none other than Novae. This would
explain why Jordanes gave as the second point of orientation Lake Neusiedler,
near the city of Carnuntum (not far from Vienna). Carnuntum was the northernmost
and westernmost city of the Ostrogothic habitat in Moesia (Pannonia), just as
Novae was the city lying furthest east and south in that habitat. It is hard to
find a better way to define the extent of the southwestern border of that
province than by giving these two points of orientation.

The original and, therefore, very
precious information provided by Jordanes was that the territory of Moesia,
once the habitat of the Getae and then the Goths, was now under the control of
the Sclaveni; Sclaveni a civitate Novietunense et laco qui appellatur
Mursiano. To this, he made two additions, since he associated the classical
Venedae (= his Venethae) with the Sclaveni and Antes of his time.
One insertion relates to the habitat of the Antes: usque ad Danastrum
(cf. Antes. . . a Danastro extenduntur § 35), and the second insertion
connects the information on the Sclaveni with that on the Venethae: in boream Viscla
(cf. ab ortu Vistulae. . . Venetharum natio. . . consedit § 34).

Jordanes associated the classical Venedae
with Vinid-, the Gothic designation for the Latin/Byzantine Sklavin-,
on the same «linguistic» grounds that he identified the Goths with the Getae:
simple similarity in sound.[64]
On the other hand, he included the group he called Venethae = Vinid-
in his introductory section for good reason: it was part of the Gothic
tradition, where the great ruler Hermanarich (§ 119) had dealings with the
Venethae. We assume, then, that Jordanes in this case is not speaking of his
own time, but is merely putting together information from his heterogeneous
sources. We cannot trust his remarks about the Venethae (= classical Venedae).
Further, Jordanes had learned about the populous band of the Venedae
from classical sources, especially Ptolemy, who connected them with the Vistula
River, even giving the Gulf of Danzig the designation κόλπος Οὐενεδικός. Tacitus wrote that the Venedi’s «plundering forays take
them over all that wooded and mountainous country» (§ 46).[65]
It was apparently on that basis that Jordanes gave his description of the
habitat of the Venethae: hi paludes silvasque pro civitatibus habent (§
35). Jordanes here is not providing contemporary, sixth-century, data, but a
rehash of material from older sources.

The word Vinid- is of
Old Germanic origin; it is related to Old Norse vinr-, which had the meaning
(established by Jost Trier) «der Genosse im Ring» (‘comrade in the ring [of the
warriors’]).[66] But, there was still another reason why Jordanes
identified Venetae (= classical Venedae) with the Germanic term Vinid-.
Like the Goths, who took over the former habitat of the Getae, the Vinid-,
of his time lived on the territory of the ancient Venedae. Jordanes’
data on the Vinid- (~ Vindi) are original and extremely
important.

He tells us that the Vidivarii
(this word has correctly been recognized as Vindivarii) live «on the
shores of the ocean (Baltic Sea) where the waters of the Vistula river stream
through three throats.» They are not an ethnic unit, but people «congregated
from different bands (or races)» (ex diversis nationibus adgregati, §
36). It is certain that in Jordanes’ Vi[n]divarii we are
dealing with a form of a name which Jordanes incorrectly took to be a supposed
illustration of the original name of the people concerned: Vindi = Sclavi,
plus the Latin word varii, meaning ‘different.’

It is fortunate that Jordanes
provides another form of this name: Viuidarii, gens Viuidaria (§
96, which specialists have also corrected to Vinidarii). The second
element in the name, -varii > -arii, stands for the Germanic *vari-ōs
‘defender.’[67]
The term *vinid-[v]ari-ōs, therefore, should be translated
as «defender of the comrades in the [warriors’] ring» (or possibly: «inhabitant
of the ring»).[68]
The remaining information that Jordanes furnishes corroborates this proposed
etymology. He writes:

«The same Gepidae were
bursting with envy as long as they lived in the region of Spesis (Spesis
provincia, unidentified hapax)[69]
on the island surrounded by spits of the Vistula, which in their own language
they called Gepedoios (Germ. ojos «island»). Now, I was told, this
island is inhabited by the kind (gens)
*Vinid-ari, since the [Gepidae] left (ca. 250) for better lands.

It is well known that the *Vinidarii
[are those] who had congregated together from different bands [or races] (ex
diversis nationïbus) as if to one refuge and had formed one kind (in
unum asylum collecti sunt et gentem fecisse noscuntur, § 96)».[70]

8.

This definition of the Vinid-ari-
is of profound importance for European history. Jordanes was in large part a
compiler, and he patched together facts or statements from many different
sources with no regard at all for the times and places these sources were
written. Yet, when he reports about groups and events for which he has
contemporary information, he seems to have been accurate and, therefore, we can
trust his statements.

During his lifetime, an
institution that would subsequently have worldwide importance was in the
process of formation. In Germanic, it was called Vinid-, in the
Byzantine cultural sphere Σκλαβην-/Sclavīn-, and (later) in the Islamic world aṣ-Ṣaqlab.
From Jordanes, we can deduce that these terms were originally neither ethnic
nor linguistic in meaning, but organizational. What was involved was a new kind of military organization, but one similar
to groups which repeatedly were formed in the course of the rise of steppe or
sea paces. Paesants from different
hamlets, often diverse in ethnic origin but always similar in parochial
outlook, after having spent some time together in a refuge—like the Vinidarii—and
having undergone military training, developed into a band of professional
warriors using the same lingua franca.

Let us recall two other
equivalent terms used by Jordanes: the phrases vagina nationum and officina
gentium, i.e., ‘the vagina of bands,’ and the ‘factory of tribes’ (§ 25).
These are revealing metaphors, surely, meaning the whole system of attracting
raw recruits, gathering them into a training ground whose location was, for the
observers in the sedentary empires, mysterious or even fantastic, and then
se[n]ding out terrifying masses of trained soldiers in sudden and devastating
attacks against distant territories. Even from Jordanes’ data, it is evident
that Scandinavia was not the original home (Urheimat)
of the Goths. Berig had assembled his people there to train them for his
planned military campaigns on the European continent. Both Scandinavia and the
Vistula delta—like Mongolia earlier and later, and like the Zaporogian Sič in
the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries—were training centers for the transformation
of peasants (or pasturalists, or even fishermen) from the surrounding
territories into a class of professional warriors.

This is, then, another
instance of a phenomenon which kept repeating in Eurasian history. The
non-historical pastoralists or peasants beyond the limes of the existing historical empires (Rome, Iran, China), who
had no experience with the larger world, and whose parochial interests,
therefore, did not in any way predispose them to larger political bodies, were
more often than not forced into undergoing a period of training that absorbed
them into one larger body. This process, which usually lasted over successive
generations for at least one century, created an upper class among the trainees
that was cognizant of larger political bodies. That class became ready to take
part in strengthening a pax and in
forging the parochial dialects into a standard medium of communication for the
entire pax. Linguae francae
developed that embraced diverse linguistic entities into a «common language,»
whether based on Turkic or Slavic (or other) materials. Upon the demise of the pax, it was possible for several
full-fledged «daughter languages» to emerge. This involves a concept of
language development often ignored by those who take too literally the model of
the genealogical tree of language, as it was elaborated during the age of
Romanticism. Rather than seeing only branches that continually sprout new branches,
we are saying that a lingua franca
which has evolved in order to serve large areas itself becomes a new and fairly
uniform «tree» that then slowly puts forth new branches.

I spent four decades studying all
twenty-two living Turkic languages, along with all the extinct forms that are
known, with the aim of uncovering a Proto-Turkic stage (or perhaps more than
one). I could not escape the conclusion that the oldest reconstructable common
Turkic is the stage which directly preceded the oldest Turkic written texts,
about 550–650, that is to say the time when the Turkic pax with its lingua franca, essentially free of dialectal
diversities, was created.

My friend and colleague, Horace G.
Lunt, has recently told me that he has had essentially the same experience with
Slavic material. The oldest reconstructable Slavic differs so little from attested
Old Church Slavonic, whose normalized form can be put in the ninth century,
that OCS itself must be considered a dialect form of Common Slavic, and a
dialect-free stage could be envisaged for as late as 750–800.

Historians have generally used
linguistic abstractions, such as the notion of Common Slavic, for their own purposes,
without trying to discover what objective reality was behind them. We need to
try rather to study concrete peoples in concrete situations, insofar as this is
possible. It is my conviction that only a method of historical
sociolinguistics, such as we are suggesting here, can produce valid answers to
our valid questions.

9.

Let us turn to another
equation made by Jordanes in his introduction (§ 35). He presents the Antes
as the same, apparently meaning the same society, as the Sclaveni,
although they are stronger than the Sclaveni. There are two points to be
considered before we turn to the etymology of this name. The first is the minor
but perhaps significant fact that Jordanes has the plural form Antes[71]
(Antium), which is unexpected as an equivalent of the Greek Ἄνται (sg. Ἄντης) of all other
sources.[72]
The second is that this group appears and disappears during the brief span
between 535 and 602 in Procopius, Menander, Agathias, Pseudo-Mauricius,
Theophylact Simocattes and Theophanes;[73]
it is only Jordanes that mentions Antes outside this period. He brings them up
in connection with the Ostrogoths at the end of the fourth century. In a
passage explicitly derived from old sources (and perhaps we may assume here the
Gothic songs Jordanes mentions in his introduction), Jordanes relates how the
resistance of the Antes was crushed by the Gothic king Vinitharius (fl.
about 400). He captured Boz, «rex» of the Antes, and crucified him along with
his sons and seventy nobles (primates, § 247). At that time, namely during
the «third habitat,» the Goths lived super limbum Ponti, «above an arm
of the Pontic Sea,» that is, in the curve north of the Black Sea, between the
Dniester and Dnieper rivers (§ 82), called the Lukomorie in sources from
Kievan Rus’.[74]
Hence, Jordanes never actually defines the current habitat of the Antes in his
own time, but merely recounts at second-hand tales about the glorious past of
the Goths. A reasonable hypothesis is that the Antes/Antai, like the Vinid-
(who, as we already know, merged in Jordanes’ mind with the Venedae of
classical times) were present in the Gothic oral traditions. The Vinid- were linked with the great
Ostrogothic king Hermanarich (d. 375) who, having overpowered the Heruli,
forced them and the Baltic Aesti to submit to his rule (§ 119).[75]

As for the other historians, speaking
of near-contemporary events of the sixth century, their statements are remarkably
vague. In Pseudo-Mauricius, Σκλάβοι and Ἄνται are always linked, in that order, while Procopius has Σκλαβηνοί and Ἄνται four times, but Ἄνται and Σκλαβηνοί three times, though
does mention the Ἄνται alone in two extensive passages. In
fact, it appears that this name had no precise meaning to the sixth-century
historians.

This analysis shows clearly
that §§ 35–36 do not contain precious information about the topography of the
putative three branches of the Slavs, contrary to the belief of many scholars.
Rather, apart from the current location of the Sclaveni in Jordanes’ former
homeland, Pannonian Moesia (a civitate Novietunense et laco qui appellatur
Mursiano, § 35) and the information on the non-Slavic Vistula Vinidarii,
all the data are only various insertions the compiler took from different
sources, whether classical writings or oral traditions, of the Goths
themselves. Jordanes put the Vinid-,
Sclaveni and Antes together not on the basis of ethnic or linguistic criteria,
but because all three terms refer to institutions of military colonists on
frontier territories. Although these findings may dismay Slavists, it will help
historians understand the process of nation-building in medieval Europe and
Asia.[76]

III.

1.

It was not only the
Ostrogoths who possessed the institution of Vinid-. They are also
attested among the Franks, the ephemeral realm of the Frankish merchant Samo,
and the Lombards (Langobards).

The Frankish Vinidi
occur explicitly in the «Chronicle» of Pseudo-Fredegar Continuatus under the
years 747–748.[77]
But, there is good reason to suppose that the Vinidi were already employed by Sigibert as early as 562–565 (see
sect. V. 1). They must have been stationed both along the Frankish-Bavarian
frontier (the Main, Regnitz and Baunach rivers, i.e., Franconia) and in the
frontier territory between the Saale and Elbe rivers (i.e., Thuringia). The
latter supposition is corroborated by King Alfred the Great, who in his
updated, Anglo-Saxon version of Paul Orosius’ work (ca. 890–899) clearly
locates the Vinidi there: Wineda
lond, þe mon hœtt Sysyle ‘The Vinidi-land,
called Sysyle.’[78]
The word Sysyle is also of importance, for it is doubtless a term used by the
Heruli, relatives of the early Norsemen (cf. ON sýsla) and means
«stewardship; district, bailiwick, prefecture.»[79]
This means that the Franks used an Old Norse designation for the territory
where the Frankish Vinidi were stationed. Apparently, it was mostly
Heruli, or other «Scandinavians» who were recruited for service as Vinidi.[80]

Historical toponymy supplies
further proof that military colonies existed along the two Frankish limites of
Franconia and Thuringia. Medieval documents from these territories have provided
139 toponyms containing the name Vinid-, 88 in Franconia and 51 in
Thuringia.[81]
The oldest documentation for Franconia (the Main-Radenz limes) goes back to the eighth century (741: Moinuuinida et
Radanzuinida, i.e., «the Winidi
of the Main [river] and the Winidi of
the Radenz [river]»).[82]
Thuringian Winidi names first appear
in documents from 874; curiously enough the name is again Moinuuinida.[83]

Hans Jacob’s studies of
field-names (Flurnamen) and abandoned
settlements (Wüstungen)[84]
in historical documents and oral history have shown a relation between the
so-called «Slavic» place-names and the system of the burghs, which was evolving
during the eighth century.

Jordanes’ data in §§ 118–119,
where he is dealing with the Ostrogoth Hermanarich’s establishment of an empire
(Reichsgründung) in the fourth
century, seem to indicate that the military organisation of the Winidi
type (or Venethae) were a creation of the Heruli. This «merkwürdiges Volk» (to
quote Ernst Schwartz)[85]
of East Germanic origin dominated Eastern Europe between 267 and about 350, as
the «nomads of the sea» of the epoch; their first activity was on the periphery
of the Bosporus kingdom. This fact could explain the presence of the «Old
Norse» elements (e.g., sýsla) in the language of the Thuringian Vinidi, as I mentioned above. The Ostrogoths
took over the system, since the Venethi are named by Jordanes among
those who were «obedient to Hermanarich’s command» (§ 120).

2.

Later, during the first half of the
sixth century, the institution of the frontiermen Vinidi was introduced
to Central Europe by the Salian Franks who, after their great victories in Gaul, had entered on the path of
state-building within the Roman-Christian cultural patterns.

Vinidi in
the realm of Samo occur in the «Chronicle» by Pseudo-Fredegar II over a period
of ten years (623–633). This source contains the phrase Sclaui coinomento
Winidi,[86]
i.e., «the Slavi [possibly already slavophone] known as [professional warriors
of the] Winidi [type].» The terminology
shows that in Burgundy in about 660,[87]
the place and date of the work’s composition, the existence of disciplined
warriors called Vinidi who (possibly) used Slavic as a lingua franca
was already well known.

From the context of the Samo
story in the same source, we see that the terms Vinidi and Sclavi
were originally oppositional rather than substitutional. The befulci or
the «cannon fodder» type warriors of the Avars were called Sclavi, and
in addition, the Sclavi still paid tribute to the Avars (p. 40), but the
Avars wintered with the Eclaui, slept with the wives of the Sclavi.

The revolutionary warriors
called Winidi made the Frankish merchant Samo their king, and he
subsequently married twelve wives from among their kind (ex genere Winidorum,
p. 40); this very likely means that these Winidi had twelve units. The Winidi
of Samo killed and robbed the Frankish merchants in 630 (p. 56); the army (exercitus)
of the Winiti had entered Thuringia in 631 (p. 62), and in 632 (p. 63).
The army of King Dagobert (d. 641) set out against the Winidi (p. 57).
Dagobert’s allies, the duke of the Alamans and the Lombards, entered the
territory of the Sclavi and took many Sclavi prisoner (p. 57).
Dagobert’s envoy Sicharius, in order to gain admittance to Samo’s presence, had
to dress as a Sclauus (p. 56). But, the most resolute Venedi had
taken refuge in a stronghold with the (traditional) Germanic name of
Wogastisburc (p. 57). In 631, the Austrasians bravely defended their frontier
and the Frankish kingdom against Winedus (p. 63).

It is still common among
scholars to substitute automatically the ethnic concept of Slavs every time the
name Vinid- appears in any kind of source (as here in Pseudo-Fredegar’s
text, Winedi and similar spellings), but this practice makes it
impossible to understand the early medieval context properly.[88]

The existence of a Lombardian
Marca Vinedorum in the Italian Abruzzi Moutains (Duchy of Beneventum) is
obvious from a comparison of two sources. While Pseudo-Fredegar II designates
the Lombardian leader who gave refuge to the Bulgarian commander
Alciocus/Alzeco as the Dux Winedorum,[89]
the Lombardian historian Paul the Deacon (d. 799) styles the same person as
duke of Beneventum.[90]

3.

The professional warriors who
in the Byzantine cultural sphere were called Ἄνται = syr. Anṭi-y-ū = Lat. Antes (~
*Anti), as documented above in fn. 73, appear within the system of the paxes of the Ostrogoths, the
Proto-Bulgars, and the Avars.

As already noted, Jordanes
calls them braver than the Sclaveni: Antes vero, qui sunt eorum fortissimi
(§ 35). The whole context we have established allows us to interpret this to
mean that they were elite troops. The conflict between them and the Gothic king
Vinitharius, and the king’s terrible vengeance, indicates that they aspired to
independence and did not submit easily (§ 247).[91]

4.

Jordanes calls the pre-Gothic
lords of the Ukrainian Mesopotamia (Gothic Oium), i.e., the territory
between the Dniester and Dnieper rivers, sometimes Spali (§ 28)[92]and sometimes Antes (§ 35), but
he never refers to them as Halani (Alans), despite the well-known fact[93]
that a Latin contemporary, Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. 330–400) writes clearly
about the war between the GothiGreuthungi and the Halani.[94]
One must suppose that one of Jordanes’ sources, probably Gothic oral tradition,
gave him reason for doing so.

The earliest occurence of the name Alan
in the west is in «Thyestes,» a tragedy by Seneca (4 B.C.E.–65 C.E.).[95]
At approximately the same time, Hou Han-shu (chap. 118, fol. 13r°)
states that the name Yen-ts'ai (= Greek Ἄορσοι
< āvrs-)[96]
had been changed into A-lan (Alan).[97]

Neither term is an ethnic or linguistic
indicator; both surely are professional designations. The Alans were a special
type of cavalrymen who used Eastern Iranian as a lingua franca. Ammianus Marcellinus writes:[98]

«Thus the Halani [Alans]...
are divided between the two parts of the earth [i.e., Europe and Asia], but
although widely separated from each other and roaming over vast tracts, as
nomads do, yet in the course of history they have united under one name, and
are, for short, all called Halani because of the similarity in their customs,
their savage mode of life, and their weapons... the young men grow up in the
habit of riding from their earliest boyhood and regard it as contemptible to go
on foot; and by various forms of training they are all skilled warriors... They
do not know the meaning of slavery, since all are of noble blood.»

From data provided by Lucian (ca.
125–190), it has been assumed that the Alans «were engaged in a practice that
modern anthropologists would classify as ritual adoption.»[99]
The remarkable career of the Alans both in Constantinople and in Western Europe
(Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain) has recently been studied by Bernard S.
Bachrach.[100]

The discrepancy in names—Halani
in Ammianus Marcellinus, but Antes in Jordanes—is easily explained. The
Antiochian Ammianus, residing in Rome, used the generic term known to everybody
in the empire. The Gotho-Alan Jordanes, knowing from his people’s tradition the
precise designation for the particular type of Alans he was describing, used
the word he considered correct.

Thus, we take it that the
Antes/Antai were the frontiersmen of the Alans, the warriors whose duty it was
to have contact with the Alans’ neighbors. This type of force was probably
created by the Alans during the fourth century, as a response to the imperial
ambitions of Hermanarich. As subsequent groups came into Eastern Europe—the
Huns in 375, and later their successors, the Utiġur-Quturġur-Bulgars—they adopted
this type of Alanic warriors for their own aims, and therefore, the sources
provide information about the Antai used by the newcomers.

Procopius (d. ca. 562) surely had in mind the Hunnic
Antai when he located them in the frontier zone of the Maeotis (Sea of Azov)
and Tanais (Don) regions to the north of the Hunnic Οὐτίγουροι.[101]

The Antai of the
Proto-Bulgars were said by Procopius to be living on the Danube limes close to the [Pannonian Proto-]
Bulgarian Σκλαβηνοί «at the time Justinian I [527–565] took over the
Roman Empire» (vol. 6, p. 216). The
Chilbudius episode in the year 546 is especially instructive concerning the
mode of action of the Bulgarian Antai.[102]
The Proto-Bulgarian Antai also occur in the «History» of Menander Protector (d.
after 582) in the context of the story of Mezamiros.[103]
All these instances show how jealously they guarded their freedom of action and
how easily conflicts between them and the Sclaveni arose.

Emperor Justinian I
established a special relationship with the Antai, who often supported him in
his many wars. He made Anticus[104]
a part of his official titulature, and in 545 he «expressed the desire that
they should all settle in an [abandoned] ancient city, Turris by name, situated
to the north of the river Ister [Danube].»[105]
From 545 to 602, the Antai usually cooperated with the Romans, but in about
560, the Avars began to assume the hegemony over Eastern Europe and to demand
loyalty from the Antai. The tragedy of these warriors—who had striven for
independence, especially in 602, and to change their masters (in this case,
from the Avars to the Byzantines)—is presented in the seventh-century «History»
of Theophylact Simocattes,[106]
and repeated in the «Chronicle» of Theophanes (760–818).[107]
These events of 602 mark the last time this group is named; at this point, the
Antai just disappear from history.

5.

The word Antai is, as Max Vasmer
has shown,[108]
of Iranian origin; the ending -tä is a typical plural suffix in the
language of the Alans (and modern Ossetians). The root is the Iranian word anta
= Sanskrit anta- ‘frontier; end.’ In developing this etymology further,
one should note, beside the derivative in Iranian *ant-ya ‘frontier-man,
Ukrainian [in the original meaning of the word],’ that Ossetian shows two
parallel forms for *antya, one with /nt/ and the other with the geminate
*/tt/ > /dd/ : ändä and äddä ‘behind.’ These forms and the
Syriac spelling anṭi-y-ū (where /ū/ is the plural suffix
functionally equal to the Alanian /tä/), suggests that the Greek Antai /antä/
goes back to *antya-tä, which developed into *anttä[109] and then was simplified by degemination. This change
suggests that the Byzantines first received the name either via the
Proto-Bulgars or from the Turks; both linguistic groups tend to avoid geminates.

The term Antai, not
unlike Winid-, appears to be a designation
for frontierman, but most probably one using an Eastern Iranian lingua franca. Possibly, the word was
the creation of the Alans, and therefore, Jordanes equated the Antes
with the Spali/*Alani (§ 28).

IV.

1.

Of the three kinds of
professional warriors mentioned by Jordanes (ca. 551), only two were connected with concrete Gothic tradition:
Venethae (= Vinidi) with the Gothic
king Hermanarich (d. ca. 374: § 119),
and the Antes with king Vinitharius (d. ca.
400: § 247). No specific deeds with regard to the Sclaveni are ascribed
to any Gothic ruler. The Sclaveni appear in Jordanes’ catalogue of the kinds of
professional warriors known to him (at the end of § 119) as an obvious
addition made to glorify his hero Hermanarich.

From this, we can deduce that
the Sclaveni were a post-Gothic institution, that is, after 400, since no
Sclaveni of Attila were known either to the eyewitness, the Byzantine diplomat
Priscus who visited Attila in 448, or to the Gothic traditions used by
Jordanes. Thus, the Sclaveni must have developed after Attila’s death in 453.

2.

Let me emphasize that this
event marked a turning point in the history of the European part of the
Eurasian steppe. Up to that time, the nomadic charismatic clans could always
count on the cooperation of the nomad[ic] Germanic kings and their retinues (comitatus).

In the last two decades of
the fifth century, the two most important Germanic tribal units, the Ostrogoths
and the Franks, settled in Italy and Gaul, and became occupied—especially the
Franks—with establishing their own sedentary states, in cooperation with
the former Roman ruling class.

It was exactly at this time
that the Hunnic establishment was recovering from the consequences of Attila’s
death and beginning to reconstitute themselves as Bulgars (Proto-Bulgars) with
two component parts, Utiġurs and Quturġurs.

Since the Germanic tribes,
and also the Alans, were being attracted by either the Goths in Italy or the
Franks in Gaul, it was necessary for the new pax-builders in the steppe to create military units on an entirely
new basis. These new warriors appear under the name of Σκλάβοι/Σκλαβηνοί. It
is remarkable that all Proto-Bulgarian branches had their own Sklavin-/Ṣ(a)qlab.
Thus, when the Hunnic Quturġurs raided Thracia and Constantinople in 559,
their Sklavin- took active part.[110] A new analysis of the data of Ibn Khurdādhbeh (ca. 840–880) has shown that Kobrat, the
creator of the Azov (Bosporus) Magna Bulgaria (d. ca. 660), was referred to by the Sasanian bureaucracy as ruler over
the Ṣaqlab/Sklavin-.[111]

The account of Ibn Faḍlān, the envoy of the Caliph of Baghdad to
the king of the Volga Bulgars in 922, also called this ruler malikaṣ-Ṣaqāliba.[112]

The Sklavin- of the Pannonian Proto-Bulgars, who
attacked the Byzantine Danube limes
from the time of Justinian I, are well known from the «History» of Procopius
and other contemporary Byzantine authors. The Kouber story (fl. 676–678)
in the fifth miracle of St. Demetrius shows that even this Bulgarian ruler, who
was under Avar suzereinty, also had his own Σκλάβοι/warriors.[113] It
would take us too far afield to deal here with the role of the Sklavin in
the First Danube Bulgarian empire created by Asparuch (679), or with the circumstances
which conditioned the decision of Tsar Simeon (893–927) to take over the Slavic
rite with Slavonic as the sacred language.

The Sklavin frontier
warriors are also attested to in the Khazar pax,
the successor state to Great Bulgaria. On the authority of the Arabic reports
about the famous expedition of Marwān b. Muḥammad into the interior of
Khazaria in 737 (especially in the work by Ibn A̒tham al-Kūfī),[114] the Khazarian Ṣaqāliba
(plural of ṣaqlab) were stationed on the Middle Volga
frontier,[115] near the confluence of the Bol’šoj Irgiz and the
Volga. It seems that during the ninth century, the new Khazar regime, headed by
a majordomo (bäg/ixšēd), had replaced the Ṣaqāliba
with another group of professional warriors, the standing army called al-Arsiya,
who were Muslims recruited from among the Khwārizmians. This we learn from the
account by al-Mas̒ūdī (ca. 940).[116]

3.

The anonymous Miracula
S. Demetrii (= Mir II; compiled ca. 675–685)[117] gives a list of five bands (ἔϑνος) of the Sklavins who attacked
Thessalonica in 614.[118] Many scholars have labored in vain to establish
Slavic etymologies of these putative «Slavic tribal names.»[119] If the Sklavin troops were created by the
Proto-Bulgars sometime during the last decades of the fifth century, as I assume,
the self-designations of these bands should reflect the Ponto-Caspian milieu of
the time, which was Hunno-(Eastern) Iranian. Let us, therefore, check to see
whether the hypothesis holds. Here are the names:[120]

Βαϊουνητ-

Βελεγεζητ-

Βερζητ-

Δρουγουβιτ-

Σαγουδατ-

Four seem to have a suffix
/it/, spelled -ητ- or -ιτ-, while the fifth may be seen as without suffix.

There is a suffix /it/ that
is very familiar to Altaists. Indeed, it occurs in the name of the Hunnic
Avars: Varxun- it (see n. 30, above).

Compare Ἐϕϑαλῖτ-αι, «Hephthalites,» derived from the name of their
leader Efthal.[121] This seems to be a parallel to a later stage in the
linguistic history of this territory, namely the self-designations of groups of
Ukrainian Cossacks that were based on the names of their leaders. There were
two patterns. The first took the stem of the leader’s name, sometimes removing
a final suffix, and added a suffix denoting «adherent of»: e.g., Mazepa:
Mazep-yn-ci, Lisowski: Lisov-čyk-y (Lat. Lissov-ian-i).[122] The second was simply the name of the leader,
e.g., Barabaš «Left-bank Cossacks,» (after 1667) from the
name of Colonel Barabaš (fl. 1647–1648).[123]

Detaching the it-suffix,
let us look at the four bases Baioun-, Belegez-, Berz- and Drougoub-.

Baioun. Here we can
read u or ū < *-aġu-,[124] plus the nominative singular suffix /n/. This is then
the equivalent of a well-known Old Turkic word, which occurs with the majestic
plural suffix /t/ (because of the meaning): bayagu-t «rich-merchant»
(the standard translation of Sanskrit śreṣṭ̣hī).
Therefore, we posit *bayūn < *baya-ġun.[125]

Belegez is a reasonable
transcription of Hunnic bel-egeč, where *bēl means
«five,» and *egeč is comparable to Old Turkic äkäč «(elder)
sister of the clan,»[126] and Old Mongolian egeči «elder
sister.»[127] The surname bel-egeč reminds one
of Beševliev, the surname of the leading Bulgarian specialist in
the field of Proto-Bulgarian inscriptions: beš-evli is Ottoman
Turkish and means «(having) five wives.»

Berz- is doubtless the front variant of the name of a
Khazaro-Bulgarian charismatic clan Barč-[128] it can
be taken as an incorrectly reconstructed form from Βερζιλ- Barč il > Bärčil,
and finally Bärč. The band leader was apparently a member of the Barč clan.

Drougouw-. This word has three distinct Hunnic (Hunno-Bulgarian)
features: first, initial d-, as against Old Turkic t-;[129] second, metathesis of the vowel, producing a consonant-cluster in initial
position, *dur- > dru-;[130] and
third, the development of the final g into –w.[131] The
root is the verb *dur- (OTurkic tur-, but Ottoman dur-)
«stand,» both in the sense of «stand upright»[132] and
«stand still» */ġuġ/ is the suffix of nomen usus. This,
then, is a surname *Druġuw (equivalent to Turkic turġuġ,
turquġ), signifying «he who usually stands still.» Kāšġarī, the
eleventh-century Turkic philologist explains the name (in Arabic) thus:
«shyness (shame, diffidence) about something; one says ol mändän turquġ =
(Arabic) ṣāra minnī ḥayīyan li-fi̒l badā minhū «he
is ashamed before me over a matter that arose concerning him.»[133] The
surname *Druguw was probably used jocularly, as an antonym, for a
very forceful person (in the manner common among the Zaporogian Cossaks later).

The fifth name, Sagudat-,
with no suffix, is of Eastern Iranian origin: *sāka-dāt «gift of
the stag»—the stag was the totem of the Scythians.[134] The etymon *śāka, in Ossetian sag,
is rendered in the Bactrian inscriptions as CΑΓΓΟ, CΑΓΟ; in the middle
of the fourth century, there was a Scythian people on the Danube called
Saga-dares *sāga-dār «stag [totem] possessor.»[135] Old Persian dāta is Middle Persian,
e.g., Pahlavi, d’t.[136]

Conclusion: the five names
preserved in Mir II are not «Slavic tribal names,» but
self-designations of Proto-Bulgarian Sklavin bands;
accordingly, they have clear Hunnic or Iranian etymologies.

4.

Since all attempts to find an
etymology of the term Sklavin-/Slav-, on native ground have
failed, one is tempted to look elsewhere.[137] Proto-Bulgarian seems the most promising spot. There,
we find a common Hunno-Turkic word saqla-, ‘to watch over,
guard, protect.’[138] The noun derived from it by the suffix */GU/ is
attested in Kazan-Tatar (Muslim progeny of the Volga Bulgars) and in Karaim
(modern Qipčaq-Polovcian), where the suffix became /-w/. In these languages,
the noun saqla-w means ‘guard, watch; guarding’ in the senses
of actor, profession, place, or action.[139] As early as Proto-Bulgarian, the suffix */GU/ had
become /w/: e.g., κολο-β-ρ (< *qola-ġu-r) ‘leader.’[140] Further, in Proto-Bulgarian, stress moved from the
root syllable to the suffix, and the root vowel then reduced, e.g., *dawl-an > dwan ’hare,’
*tovirəm > tvirəm «the ninth.»[141] Therefore, one can assume that in Proto-Bulgarian the
old *saqla-ġu would develop as *saqla-w and later
as sqlaw-. Proto-Bulgarian also had a collective suffix /-in/, used
especially to designate peoples: e.g., Volga Bulgarian Bulgar-in,
«the Bulgars,» Sowar-in «the Sowars.»[142]

Thus, our conclusion is that
there was a Proto-Bulgarian word saqlaw > sqlaw with
the plural form *sqlaw-in and two meanings: 1) «guard, watch,
guarding»; 2) «trained slave.» The Arabs, who were engaged in the slave trade,
(see below), adopted the singular form as ṣ(a)qlab,
meaning «trained slave,» while the Byzantines, who were interested in contacts
with the collective of the sqlawin on their limes, adopted it as sklavin,
adding a plural desinence: Σκλαβην-οί. In Slavic,
the suffix was modified to the collective plural -ěn-e, denoting a
social group, correlated with the singulative suffix -in-, while the
impermissible initial cluster *skl was reduced to sl.

5.

The first appearance of the name of the Sklavin is
connected with the story about the re-emigration of the Heruli from the Danube
region to Scandinavia in 512.

Procopius, recording this
event some years later (ca. 546–550; vol. 3,
p. 414) says: «These men, led by many of the royal blood (italics
mine, OP), traversed through all the band (ethnos) of the Sklavins
consecutively, and after next crossing a large tract of barren country, they
came to the Varni, as they are called. After these, they passed by the people
of the Dani.»

The exact dwelling-place of
these Sclavins of Procopius’ has continually puzzled scholars. Many locations
have been proposed, among them Bohemia, the Moravian Gate, Little Poland, and Silesia.[143] Yet, all these suggestions
rest on two unproven hypotheses: that the temporary habitat of the Heruli was
north of the Pannonian part of the Danube; and that the Heruli migrated by
land.

But, the Heruli were no
strangers in Eastern Europe. Until about 350, they were masters there and were
known as the maritime power of the epoch. They had both Azov and the Black Sea
under their control.[144] One may, therefore, conjecture that they travelled
back home to Scandinavia by boat, being under the leadership—as Procopius
clearly states—of «many of the royal blood,» who surely knew the geography of
that part of the world well. Procopius (vol. 3, p. 414) characterizes their temporary Danube settlement (before
512) as «the extremity of the world» (that is, of the Roman Empire), which at
that time was the Danube/Ister frontier in Scythia Minor, or Dobrudja. I
submit, therefore, that the Heruli began their voyage by river from the mouth
of the Dniester, reaching the Vistula by way of the San, proceded from the
Upper Vistula via the Warthe to the Upper Oder, then by the Spree and Havel to
the Elbe, thus arriving in the territory of the Varni of Mecklenburg.

If my hypothesis is correct,
then the Heruli met the Sklavins at least during their voyage up the Dniester.
We expect Sklavins in this region to account for the periodical raids, chiefly
against the nearby provinces of Moesia and Thracia, reported in Byzantine sources
for the first half of the sixth century.

6.

This leads to the next
question: what was distinctive about the Sklavin troops? The manual of military
tactics by Pseudo-Mauricius, «Artis militaris libri duodecim» (ca. 600), devotes its eleventh book to
techniques of dealing with foreign troops. Four categories are distinguished:[145]

1. Persians;

2. Scythians: Avars and
Turks;

3. Franks and Lombards;

4. Σκλάβοι and Ἄνται.

The anonymous author has
organized his material to deal with two types of warfare, psychological and
physical. This accounts for many of the pieces of information about ethnic
groups and their «character» that are assembled in this special eleventh book.
Since the author was well-read, he makes use of topoi. But, he
makes distinctions we must pay attention to. Thus, he states that, contrary to
Persian (and Byzantine) practice, the Scythians do not maintain the fixed
battle order (the classical three wings), and that Frankish troops are
organized not on the basis of professional military rank, but in terms of
tribal retainers with no bonds of discipline. The Sklavs, he tells us, had exceptional
skills in swimming and diving. They had hardly any cavalry, but operated in
guerilla fashion with surprise attacks, especially in marshy or mountainous regions.
Their archers and javelin-throwers, posted in inaccessible positions, could
harass the Byzantine army from a distance.

Several sources stress that
the Sklavs/Sklavins were specialists in the buiding of boats. Thus, Theophylact
Simocattes writes that around 595 the kagan of the Avars ordered the Sklavins
to build ships to enable his army to cross the Danube.[146] He also informs us, in a much-discussed passage, that
some Sklavini (Σκλαυηνοί) lived (which we can surely
interpret as «were stationed») «on the extreme shores of the Western Ocean,»[147] that is, the Baltic Sea.

The anonymously transmitted
«Miracles of Saint Demetrius» (Mir II, ca 675–685) we mentioned above credits the Sklavins (Σκλαβίνοι) of 614 with three maritime skills: first, they
«invented» the techniques for constructing onestrake ships (τὸ μονόξυλον or «single-straker»); second, they could make
ships of this type that could be navigated on the sea; and third, they
developed a security system for their ships during battle, using covers made of
wooden boards and skins.[148]

One is reminded of chapter 9
of De administrando imperio, where Constantine Prophyro-genitus
states that the Sklavs (Σκλάβοι) from
different Σκλαβηνίαι («Slavic regions»)
«cut the single-strakers on their mountains in time of winter,» and in spring,
they come down to Kiev to «sell them to the Rus’ (Rhos).»[149] In a different region, Paul the Deacon (d. ca. 799) writes in his «History of the
Lombards» that in about 641 «the Sclavi came with a great
number of ships and set up their camp not far from the city of Siponto» on the
Gulf of Manfredonia, Italy.[150] It is apparently because of the river skills of the
Sklavins that they are associated with other river-dwellers in a very
strange passage of Pseudo-Caesarius (ca. 530–558), οἱ Σκλαβηνοὶ καὶ Φυσωνῖται, οἱ καὶ
Δανούβιοι προσαγορευόμενοι, in
Slavonic: Slověne i Thisonitěn’ě eže i Dunavene naričjut’ se.[151] Since Theophylactus Simocattes (p. 247) also stresses
their skill in fighting from fortifications made from wagons (compare the Wagenburg defense
used by Žižka in the Hussite wars), the answer to the question we asked above
is now obvious: the unique characteristic of the Sklavin troops is that they
were amphibious units, trained for guerilla warfare both on water–especially
rivers–and on land. To put it in American terminology, they were the marines of
the epoch.

7.

But why did the Bulgars,
nomads of the steppe, need amphibious troops? The answer lies in the whole
strategic system of the time. It was Archibald R. Lewis, in discussing a number
of basic changes which had occurred during the fourth and fifth centuries, who
stressed that the most important change, curiously overlooked by maritime
historians, was «the sudden rise of a minor Greek city, Byzantium, to the
status of a great metropolis following its choice as capital by the Emperor
Constantine» (330–351).[152] Whereas Rome was essentially land-oriented, the
unique location of Constantinople, as Byzantium was now styled,
required it to be [the] «mistress of the sea.»[153] The political
and economic power of the Byzantine Empire was based on, and depended on,
domination of the seas. The nomads—[in] our case the Bulgars and later the
Avars—whose activity was oriented toward Byzantium had to adapt their tactics
to this fundamental difference. Sudden attacks by mounted archers, so effective
in the offensives of Attila and his predecessors, were no longer sufficient.

8.

Kobrat, the founder of Magna
Bulgaria (ca. 630–665),
chose for his capital the former center of the maritime Bosporus kingdom, the
port city of Phanagoria, located on the Kerch Straits.[154] His ambitions for the Bulgars required the creation
of a new type of troops, amphibious bands. The rise of the sedentary Frankish
and Langobard realms deprived the nomads of the possibility of acquiring
well-trained Germanic comrades-in-arms, as we mentioned above. The solution was
to arrange a system of special training for slaves, whether captured or purchased.
The training of slaves for various important functions was already practiced by
the itinerant merchants of Central Asia; it was a question now of special
military training. This resulted in the Sklav/ Sklavin, first introduced by the
(Proto-)Bulgars and later advanced by the Avars.[155]

As a result, in both the
Proto-Bulgar pax and the Khazar pax, still another type of Sklavin had
emerged: the professionally trained slaves. In antiquity, the principal slave
markets were the islands of Chios (in the Greek period) and Delos (in the Roman
period). After the official proclamation of Christianity in Rome (313), the
center of the slave trade seems to have shifted to the north, to the centers in
the Bosporus kingdom.[156] The trade was probably taken over by the Proto-Bulgars
and later by the Turkic Qipčaqs; the latter became the source of the mamlūk type
of military slaves, who much later (1250–1517) were to flourish in Egypt and
Syria.[157]

All this suggests that
«slave,» the second meaning of the Arabic ṣaqlab and a word
common to all western European languages[158] has the same origin.

In any event, Ḥasdai ben
Šafrūṭ, the Umayyad Spanish minister, in his letter to King Joseph of
Khazaria, designated the German King Otto I as melek Aškenaz
ve melek ha-gebalim šehem al ṣeqláb,[159] i.e., «king of the Germans and king of the
[area beyond] the mountains, i.e., of the ṣeqlab.» Thus, he
ascribed to Otto I the title which had heretofore been reserved for the kings
of the Bulgars.

9.

The term sklavin of
the Byzantine cultural sphere between the sixth and ninth centuries was very
tightly connected with the Avar pax.
In contemporary testimonies, whenever the Sklavins appear, the Avars are almost
invariably also referred to, though sometimes indirectly, usually as their
masters.

The term sklavin,
then, I contend, did not have an ethnic or linguistic entity as its referent,
but was classificatory, designating in the first instance barbaric professional
frontier warriors. No single common Slavic nation existed, nor
can we assume a feeling of one Slavic ethnic commonality.[160] Instead, the sources show that the term ἡ Σκλαβηνία/Σκλαυηνία (sing.)
or αἱΣκλαβηνίαι/Σκλαβινίαι/Σκλαυινίαι (pl.) had the meaning «any regions occupied by
the Sklavin,» that is, a stronghold, whether small or large in area, of the
frontier military colony type.[161] The first author to use the term Σκλαυηνία was Theophylact Simocattes (fl. 610–641)
referring to barbarians’ strong-holds on the left bank of the Danube.[162] The institution was known throughout the entire
province of Lower Pannonia. Several scholars (e.g., G. Ostrogorsky, F.
Dvornik, S. Antoljak, I. Boba) have established that Sklavinias also existed in
the following lands:[163]

1) Transylvania;

2) Thrace with Moesia
(Scriptor Incertus, De Leone Armenio);

3) Macedonia (Theophanes);

4) Dalmatia, including
Caruntania (Sclavenia in Latin documents of 871);

We do not have specific or
detailed descriptions of the Sklavinia type of military colony. One thing is
clear, however: each Sklavinia had its own leadership, headed by a župan (Avar
title) or ἔξαρχος or ἄρχων (Byzantine titles).[165]

The Sklavinias were united in
larger units called γένος or γενεά or gens ’gens, tribe,’ in the
same way as the nomadic oq/oġur = oġəz.
Thus, the Danube Bulgars of Asparuch, having settled in Moesia II around 679,
subjugated there the so-called «seven tribes of the Sklavini» (τῶν ... Σκλαυινῶν ἐϑνῶν τὰς λεγομένας ἑππὰ γενεάς = septem
generationum Sklavinorum).[166]

The Miracula St. Demetrii (Mir II, ca.
685) enumerates five bands of heathen Sklavin that participated
in the siege of Salonika in 614.[167] The
Armenian writer Pseudo-Mowsēs Khorenac’i (probably eighth century) mentions
that in Thrace there lived «25 sklauayin gentes.»[168]

Unlike the steppe Oġur = Oġəz, whose economy was pastoralist,
the Sklavinia type of military colony subsisted by
agriculture.[169]

Like their steppe counterparts, however, these colonies strove,
whenever circumstances permitted, to become independent of their imperial
suzerains, whether they were Avars, Bulgars, or Byzantines.

V.

1.

When the charismatic clan of a steppe pax retained its charisma among the ruling elites but was forced to
abandon its habitat, it would try to restore itself on another territory. Two
patterns are observable. In the first, the ruling elites persuaded their
partners and forced their chattel to accompany them. In the second, they sought
new partners and chattel from among local peoples.

A classic example of the first pattern were the originally
Proto-Mongolian Säbirs (the ancestors of the Hungarians), who, when they left
their Ob-Irtysh habitat in Siberia around 460, took with them several leading
tribes of their confederation as well as their chattel, the cousins of the
modern Mansi (Voguls) and Khanti (Ostjaks). In the course of its history, this pax changed its charismatic clans with
their official languages (Majġar, Lebed, Arpad, Anjou, Habsburg) and its name
(Säbir, Turks, Onnoġurs, etc.) several times. The speech of its chattel was to
have a remarkable course of development: in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, due to the impact of German Romanticism, it became the Hungarian
national language.[170]

The (Pseudo-)Avars had arrived in the Maeotis-North Caucasus
region as fugitives. The Byzantine sources give their number as twenty thousand(twotümäns),[171] and
say that the vigorous young adventurers immediately caught the attention of the
neighboring peoples.

The Avars brought with them the vision of a pax, and they immediately began to try to establish it. They required
the usual six elements for the formation of a pax:

1) moneylenders,

2) new partners,

3) new territory,

4) military forces,

5) chattel,

6) provisions.

Thanks to the unusual sagacity of their leader (Kagan Bayan, ca. 558–582), they succeeded in securing
all six within a decade (558–568). Evidently, the Iranian merchants of the
«Alan» confederacy, who immediately recognized that the future pax would hold great opportunities for
them, provided the Avars with funds while they were still in the North
Caucasus. Proof of this is that the Avars requested and received assistance
from the «king» of the Alans in establishing contacts with Byzantium.[172] Subsequently,
all territories important for commercial strategy, including the Danubelimes, the Elbe frontier with
the Franks, and the Baltic coast, immediately came under the control of the
Iranian establishments, called in the sources Serbs, Croats, Obotriti andVilti.[173]

The first to join the Avars as partners were the HunnicOnnoġursandQuturġurs,
and, a little later, theTarniax.[174] Soon
they forced into the confederacy other Hunnic groups, the Utiġursand the Proto-MongolianΖαβενδέρ=Zäben-der(=Säbir),
who previously had ordinarily cooperated with Byzantium.[175]

To organize a military force, the Avars needed the military and
administrative specialists obtainable from sedentary states. At that time, this
meant Byzantium and the Frankish empire. Bayan, the new charismatic leader,
chose to look to the Franks. His first attack on the Frankish frontier was
defeated, in 562.[176] Three
years later, however, he won a great victory over the Frankish king Sigibert
and, to judge from the data in both Frankish and Byzantine sources, he
accomplished his objectives in 565.[177]

The treaty between Sigibert and Bayan that ensued was mediated by
Sigibert’s brother-in-law, Alboin, the new king of the Lombards and a
determined foe of the Gepidae, who at that time lived in Pannonia. For his help
in destroying the Gepidae, Bayan demanded and received from Alboin one tenth of
the Lombardian livestock, half of their Gepidian booty, and the habitat of the
Gepidae, Pannonia, for the Avars to settle in.[178]

Having accomplished all this, Bayan set to work on the three last
items on his agenda—obtaining and training specialists, and establishing a
standing military force.

Unfortunately, the existing sources do not touch directly upon
these extremely important matters. They do, however, contain information which
allows us to construct the following hypothesis.

Bayan wanted to station frontier warriors of Proto-Bulgarian,
Antai and Sklavin type along the Byzantine limes.
By this time, he had already obtained military instructors of the Winidi class from the Frankish frontier.
He still needed expendable soldiers for an army, a problem he solved by
systematic capture of the local peasantry, ancestors of the future Slovenes,
Czechs, Poles, and Sorbs. We can assume that he co-opted peoples whose descendants
even today use the name «Avar» (obr, etc.) with the meaning «giant.»[179] TheWinidi, as this new force was
called, under the influence of the more developed Germanic lingua franca used by their military instructors, had considerable
impact on the Slavophone masses (see below).

The terminology of the Samo passage in Pseudo-Fredegar’s «History»
strengthens our hypothesis. As we saw above in section III.2., a close analysis
reveals an opposition between the leaders, called Winidi, and the
masses, calledSclavi.

2.

Gradually, a Slaviclingua
francadeveloped in the
military camps of the Avar pax, a
language more sophisticated than the «hamlet idioms» and capable of conveying
military orders, recording bureaucratic reports, and expressing ideas in the
emerging, if limited, cultural life of the pax.

This wholly contemporary common Slavic language was stabilized by
the end of the eighth century, and even later borrowings from one area to
another would be adapted to the local dialect variants. Thus, the word for
‘king’ among Catholic Slavs was taken from «Common Slavic» *karl-,
derived from the name of the destroyer of the Avar Pax, Charlemagne (d. 814), becomingkraljin Croatian,králin Czech and Slovak,królin Polish and thenkorol’in East Slavic, where the word
referred to western rulers, or eastern rulers crowned by the pope.[180]

Concurrently, a uniform material culture of «lower upper classes»
was developing (as archeological finds have demonstrated) which adopted Avar
metal art, primarily the Keszthely metal culture. As Helmut Preidel has shown,
artifacts of this Avar metal culture became a status symbol among all non-Avar
peoples of the pax.[182]

The bearers of this refined culture—the new military and
administrative elites of non-Avar origin—separated themselves from the «lower
classes» (smerdi‘peasants’)[183]and adopted designations and titles of
Germanic or Oriental origin that survived the Avar catastrophe. Thus, we find edlinger and casenzin Carinthia,vitezandžupanin Sorbia (Saxony), andszlachtain Poland.[184]

The forcible destruction of parochial kinship ties and the
amalgamation of disparate primitive elements into professional units which had
a larger group culture, were turbulent experiences that left an indelible mark
on popular tradition. Witnesses to this are the stories about Avar oppression
preserved in Pseudo-Fredegar[185]and thePovèst’ vremennyx lět.[186]

After the demise of the Avar Pax
(ca. 796), several successor states
emerged in which the Slavic-speaking, Avar-trained charismatic clans (of both
Slavic and non-Slavic origin, especially Iranian) of Serbs and Croats were
all-powerful. This process was documented in part by Constantine
Porphyrogenitus in «De administrando imperio» (ca. 948).[187]

Later, after Christianization, the local charismatic clans, now
the ruling classes, regarded it as incumbent upon them to abandon their Avar past
in favor of their alleged true peasant and Slavic origin. There is good documentation
about this development in Slavonia,[188] Bohemia,[189] and Poland.[190]

3.

The Avar Pax, which
existed throughout Central Europe for some two and a half centuries (558–796),
left an indelible mark on European development. During that time, the local
peasants, disparate in language, with horizons not reaching beyond their own
hamlets, were uprooted and brought together into larger communities in military
colonies on the Danube frontier, thereby setting the stage for the development
of a common Slavic language, which would be capable of serving as a means of
communication for a larger territory.

Speakers of this new lingua
franca now began to appropriate the professional termSklavin(of non-Slavic origin) as a
self-designation, with the result that it created the illusion that an ethnic
consciousness had existed long ago in remote Proto-Slavic periods.

The old tradition (especially that of thePověst’ vremennyx lět)[191]about the origin of the Slavs along the
Danube should not be understood in the Romantic sense of anUr-Heimator original home from which the Slavic
ethnic tribes migrated in different directions. Instead, it refers to the
period of Avar military colonies along the Danube frontier, where untutored
parochial peasants were trained, were formed into larger communities, and
worked out a more capacious and sophisticatedlingua
franca.

The puzzle of rapid Slavic «colonization» along the great Central
and East European rivers during the 6th to 9th century can now be regarded as
solved: as the «marines» of their time, the Sklavins (the future Slavs) were
trained to move swiftly along the rivers, the only local highways of the epoch.

The activity on the Avar-Byzantine and the Avar-Frankish frontiers
was, indeed, a requisite stage for the future development of the Slavic
cultures and nations.

APPENDIX

A select bibliography of
recent archeological (and some historical) publications on the Avars.

[3]Archeological research to about 1954 is
conveniently listed in the standard work by DeszőCsalylány,Archäologische Denkmäler der
Awarenzeit in Mitteleuropa. Schrifttum und Fundorte, Budapest 1956, 244
pp., 1 map. In my Appendix below, I update his bibliography (pp. 17–63), but I
repeat the pre-1954 items, which are basic for the history of the Avars.

[4]See the sound criticism by the German
archeologist Helmut Preidel in his «Awaren und Slawen,»Südostforschungen11, Munich 1952, 33–45.

[5]Bone artifacts with short (ritual?)
runiform signs have been found in certain Avar-period graves in Hungary (e.g.
Jánoshida, kom. Szolnok; Szentes-Felsőcsordajárás, kom. Csongrád). Although the provenance of the script
has not yet been determined with any certainty, some scholars speak of «Avar
runes»; cf. Jovan Kovačević,Avarski
kaganat, Belgrade 1977, p. 12. See also J. Vásáry, «Runiform signs on
objects of the Avar period (6th–9th cc. A.D.),»Acta Orientalia25, Budapest 1972, 335–347.

[6]Most famous and also historically
important are the T'u-chüe (Türküt) Turkic imperial runic inscriptions from the
Orkhon valley (Mongolia; first half of the eighth century). They are given with
English translations (not always reliable) by Talât Tekin in hisA Grammar of Orkhon Turkic,
Bloomington, Ind. 1968, pp. 231–295.

[7]Three more or less reliable attempts to
place the Avars in universal history have been published recently, but they are
limited by a Europe-centered attitude. One, by a Slovak historian with some
Byzantino-logical background, Alexander Avenarius, was cited in note 2, above.
The second, by a leading Serbian archeologist, Jovan Kovačević,Avarski kaganat(Belgrade 1977), gives an even-handed
presentation of all known basic archeological facts, but since it lacks
footnotes, a non-specialist reader may have difficulty in evaluating it. The
best of the three, however, is the short but well documented overview by
Wojciech Szymański, cited in note 2, above.

[16]By «professional,» I mean that they had
training and probably some experience, along with charisma, and, therefore,
were known as people with special expertise. To take an analogy from recent
history, the newly-independent Balkan nations of the nineteenth century, after
experimenting with local rulers, looked to known «charismatic clans»—the
families of Saxe-Coburg, Oldenburg, Hohenzollern, and the like—to come with
retinues of professional administrators, to organize the new states of
Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, and Albania.

[22]For Latin, we know that a few traits later
characteristic of individual languages existed fairly early, and we must assume
this to be true also of Turkic; what is important is that the major structure
and the most important details appear to be shared in all areas. As for Greek,
the initial establishment of thekoiné,
thelingua francaof the Hellenistic age and the
ancestor of modern Greek, was accomplished during the hundred years after the
death of Alexander of Macedon. For a good account, see Karl Brugmann and Eduard
Schwyzer,Griechische
Grammatik, Munich 1953, pp. 116 ff., and Albert Debrunner,Geschichte der griechischen Sprache,
vol. 2, Berlin 1954.

[32]See Theophylact Simocattes, as in fn. 13.
For Chinese Hsien-pi as equivalent to Byz.Σαβιρ-/Σαβηρ- see O. Pritsak, «From the Säbirs to the Hungarians,»Hungaro-Turcica. Studies in honour
of Julius Németh, Budapest 1976, pp. 28–30.

John’s
three-volumeEcclesiastical
Historyis said to have
covered events from 44 to 584, but only the last volume, starting in 575, has
survived. See Nina Viktorovna Pigulevskaja,Sirijskie
istočniki po istorii narodov SSSR, Moscow-Leningrad 1941.

[35]For the moment, I am excepting an episode
involving the Gothic Heruli in an area outside the Byzantine sphere, which
scholars date to about 512, see vol. 3, p. 414 of the Loeb Classical Library
edition of Procopius by H. B. Dewing (Cambridge, Mass. 1924 [reprint 1968]),
but will return to it below in section IV.5.

[36]One passage in theHistorysays that the Antai first crossed the
Ister (Danube) and arrived in the vicinity of Naissus (Niš) during the reign of
Justinian I (518–527), ed. Dewing, vol. 5, p. 38.

[40]These passages are to be found on pages
136 and 150 of the edition by Elena Česlavovna Skržinskaja,Iordan. O proisxoždenii i dejanijax
getov, Moscow 1960. Note that Jordanes, in dealing with non-Romans, uses
terms denoting three levels of organization, though he is not always consistent
(see Skržinskaja’s commentary, p. 254, note 313, and p. 256, note 316):populus,gens, andnatio. The highest unit I
translate as «people,» the intermediate is «tribe» or «kind,» and the smallest
group is then «band,» although the term seems strange in view of other uses ofnatioby other writers and in other ages.
Yet, this translation is also justified forἔϑνοςin Procopius and some other Greek writers,
as will become apparent in subsequent sections of this discussion.

[41]For a typical example, see the
authoritative 1954 textbookPrzegląd
i charakterystyka języków słowiańskich, by T. Lehr-Splawinski, W.
Kubaszkiewicz, and F. Slawski, three of the most important Polish Slavists in
our century, pp. 19–20.

[42]Herodotus,Historiae,IV.95.1–3. According to
classical authors, Zalmoxis was the god of the Getae, not merely a human.

[58]Jordanes uses Hypanis, the classical
designation for the Boh, but in connection with a fictional Black Sea Greek
colony:Hypannis(oppidum[§ 46]), mentioned along with another
alleged Black Sea city,Callipolida[§ 32]. Both «cities» appear solely
because Jordanes misunderstood a passage in the work of Pomponius Mela,
(Chorogr.II.1.6 andII.7). See also Skržinskaja’s
commentary, notes 145–146, pp. 226–227.

[59]Jordanes also preserved the post-Attilan
Hunnic name for the Dnieper: Var (= vär) (§ 174). On this name, see my article,
quoted in fn. 30 above.

[64] Since virtually all later Germanic sources use the
terms Veneti, Venedi, Wenden, Winden, and the like to refer to neighboring
Slavs, scholars assume (wrongly) that this equation was also used already by
the Goths.

[70]Gerard Labuda devoted a special study to
the problem of Vidivarii and Vindivarii: «Vidivarii Jordanesa,»Fragmenty dziejów słowiańszczyzny
zachodniej, vol.1,
Poznan 1960, pp. 96–109. In general, I agree with his results.

[72] The Byzantine Greeks put this foreign name
into the normal class with singular in -ης and plural in -αι, like στρατιώτης :
στρατιῶται. The singular Ἄντης is attested once in Procopius (vol. 4, p. 268)
and once in Agathias (ed. L. Dindorf,HGM,
p. 275), while the plural Ἄνται is universal in Greek. Jordanes, who was
heavily dependent on written sources, as we have seen, apparently found the
singular Ἄντης in a Greek text (Agathias?) and took it over.

Though the first two books of the history
by the Syrian John of Ephesus (d. 586) were lost (cf. fn. 34 above), scholars
believe that certain passages have survived in the later Syrian compilations by
Michael the Syrian (d. 1199) and Barhebraeus (d. 1286). The passages containing
the nameAnṭiyū(for Greek Ἄνται) have been treated
recently by the Semitist Ruth Stiehl (in Franz Altheim,Geschichte der Hunnen, vols.
1–2 [Berlin 1959–60]). The name occurs in Michael, vol. 1, p. 88, and in
Barhebraeus, vol. 2, p. 29 (cf. Michael’sChronicon,
ed. P. Bedjan [Paris 1980], p. 90).

[76] Parenthetically, let us complete
Jordanes’ catalogue of the people of Scythia. He named as living in the
northern portion, but south of the Aesti, a pastoralist people calledAcatziri, whom he knew about
from Priscus (d. ca. 472 [«Fragmenta,» ed. Dindorf,HGM, vol. 1, Leipzig 1870, pp.
298–99, 306, 310, 341, 346]). The Hunnic Bulgars he placedsupra mare Ponticum, (which
seems to be the same area he assigned to the Antes in § 35) in the curve of the
Black Sea; their recent raids (550–551) on Byzantine lands (across the Danubelimes, also described by
Procopius (vol. 5, pp. 234, 236, 238, 240, 242) are termed «punishment for
sins» by Jordanes (§ 37). The catalogue of nomadic peoples is enlarged by three
«Hunnic» peoples, again taken from Agathias (Historiae,HGM, vol. 2, p. 365) and
Priscus («Fragmenta,»HGM,
vol. 1, p. 341) and, possibly, from Gothic tradition: theAltziagiri, (var.Vltinzures§ 272),Saviri, and the commercially
activeHunuguri(§ 37).

[77]The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of
Fredegar with its Continuations, ed. John Michael Walxace-Hadrill, London 1960, p. 101.

[81] Among investigators who have discovered
these toponyms are Ernst Eichler, Rudolf Fischer, Hans Jacob, Erhard Müller,
Horst Naumann, Ernst Schwarz, and Hans Walther. In 1965, German and Polish
scholars established a special yearbook,Onomastica
Slavogermanica, published alternately in Berlin and Wrocław (Breslau).

[88] Kunstmann’s notion thatSamowas not a Frankish name (against the
testimony of the sources which know very well the Galloromance nameSamon,Sammo, etc; see G. Labuda,Pierwsze państwo słowiahskie.
Państwo Samona[Poznan 1949],
pp. 119–124), but a Slavicsamŭ,
an elliptic form forsamodĭržĭcĭ(autokrator) is completely impossible
historically, just as it would be out of the question to assume that a
pre-Columbian American Indian would understand and appreciate the problems of
Italian Humanism and Renaissance.

As for the location of Wogastiburc, two
main contenders still hold the field, but significantly enough, both places are
in Franconia. One, defended by Rudolf Grünwald, is the former Celtic «oppidum»
of Wugastesrode near Staffelstein on the Main («Wogastiburc,»Vznik a počátky Slovanů2[Prague 1952] 99–120). The opposing
view is presented by Hans Jacob, taking Samo’s «burc» to be Burk near Forchheim
on the Regnitz river («War Burk das historischeWogastiburc, und wo lag dasOppidum Berleich?»WdS25(1980), 39–67; see also Jacob’s «Das
Allodium Wugastesrode,»Forschungen
und Fortschritte37,
Berlin 1963, 44–45).

The concept that Samo’s activities constituted
the «first Slavic state» should be abandoned, the sooner the better. The Slavs
of the first half of the seventh century were not yet sufficiently advanced to
be capable of establishing their own statehood. I submit, however, that it is
entirely plausible to interpret this episode as cooperation between the
Frankish merchant Samo and the Germanic-speaking frontiersmen against the
Frankish king.

[91]In
this connection, see the provocative article by Bohdan Strumins'kyj, «Were the
Antes Eastern Slavs?»,Eucharisterion2=HUS4(1979–80) 786–796.

[92] Josef Markwart (Untersuchungen zur Geschichte von
Eran, part 1 [Göttingen 1896], p. 37) suggested that Jordanes took the
name Spali from Pliny (Nat. hist. VI.7.22).
Procopius uses instead the form Sporoi, and he clearly connects
them with the Antai. He writes, «In fact, the Σκλαβηνοί and Ἄνται actually had a single name in the
remote past, for they were both called Σπόρους (= Spori) in olden times»
(vol. 4, p. 272). New literature and discussions in Skržinskaja's
commentary on Jordanes (note 70, p. 194) and two articles by Henryk Łowmiański
in SSS5 (1975), «Spalowie» (pp. 354–355) and
«Sporowie» (p. 366).

[111]The information has survived in Arabic
translation as malikaṣ-Ṣaqāliba. See Pritsak, The
Origin of Rus’, vol. 1, pp. 61–62.

[112]See the text of his «Risāla,» ed. Andrij
Kovalivs’kyj, Kniga Axmeda ibn-Fadlana o ego putešestvii na Volgu v
921–922 gg., Xarkiv 1956, p. 346, and the excursus by A. Zeki Validi Togan,
«Anhang über ‘Ṣaqāliba’,» in his Ibn Faḍlān’s Reisebericht,
Leipzig 1939, pp. 295–331. Among the members of the Abbassid mission to the
Volga–Bulgars was a certain Bārs aṣ-Ṣaqlabī, i.e., a Volga-Bulgar by the name
of Bars (Turkic ‘leopard,’ frequently used as a personal name), see the
facsimile in Kovaliv’skyj’s ed., p. 344.

[155]The military slave system has recently
been analyzed by Daniel Pipes, Slave soldiers and Islam, New Haven
1981. It seems to me that he overemphasizes the connection between Islam and
military slavery.

[157]David Ayalon, «Preliminary remarks on
the Mamlūk military institution in Islam,» in V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp,
eds., War, technology and Society in the Middle East, London 1975,
pp. 44–58. In the time of the OttomanPax,
Kaffa (Kefe) on the Crimea was again the preeminent slave market.

[158]The Arabic word ṣaqlab/ ṣiqlab with
the meaning «slave» was already well established in the Islamic Abbasid East in
the first half of the ninth century, see Pritsak, «An Arabic text on the trade
route of the corporation of ar-Rūs in the second half of the ninth
century,» Folia Orientalia12, Cracow 1970, 231–257.
This meaning of the word did not apparently become common in the Islamic
Umayyad West (Spain) until the first half of the tenth century. Two important
recent studies include earlier bibliography: Ch. Verlinden, «L’origine de Sklavus
= Esclave,» Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi. Bulletin Du Gange17,
Brusselles 1943, 97–128; Henry and Renée Kahane, «Notes on the history of
sclavus,» Studi in onore di Ettore Lo Gatto e Giovanni Maver, Rome
1962, pp. 345–360. Cf. also T. Pekkanen and G. Korth, cited in note 137 above.

[160]Leszek Moszyński’s paper, cited in fn. 137
above, gives the gratifying assurance that even in Poland, the bastion of
Slavic scholarly patriotism, a sober perspective is possible. He states clearly
that the term Slověne was never used as a self-designation by
any «Proto-Slavic» tribe.

Verlinden: I should then start with a question about
what you said about the chronology of the first appearance of the Slavs in
Proto-Bulgar. I think—perhaps I didn’t grasp exactly what you meant since you
had such an enormous quantity of material to develop—I think that you said that
the first appearance of Slavs is from the 5th or 6th century. Is that correct or
not?

Pritsak: Our first information about the Bulgarian
Slavs comes from about the middle of the sixth century along the Danube
(Byzantine sources), but as far as the Slavs at the Kuban-Fanagoria region are
concerned, our data belong to the time of Kobrad, which is the first half of
the seventh century.

Verlinden: But bookform is, when it is written, in
Arabic, isn’t it?

Pritsak: The data on the Fanagoria Slavic slaves are
written in an Arabic source, but they were based on the information contained in
the Sassanian materials. The Arabic author in question is Ibn Khurdädhbeh,
himself of Iranian origin.

Verlinden: That may be true, but for instance, if you
look at the facts in South-Western Europe, in Spain, where there are mentions
of imported slaves, you find this only from the 10th century onwards, not
before that. So, there is a problem of chronology in all this matter. I don’t
exactly realize how you can postulate trades in slaves from the extreme Eastern
part of Europe to the West in the periods you say.

Pritsak: Excuse me, here I would like to stress the
fact that the word ṣaqlab/pl. ṣaqāliba had two
meanings. The first meaning was «frontier-warriors,» and this meaning we know
from the Danube limes and from some other territories, as
discussed in my paper.

The second meaning was «trained slaves,» «slaves trained to
rule (especially the nomadic pax),» as the Mameluks later did. We
know about them during an earlier period from the Islamic sources dealing with
the Islamic East. As far as the Islamic West is concerned, you are right, the
data are only from the tenth century on. But if we take, for instance, the
sources dealing with the military campaign by Marwan b. Muḥammad against the
Khazars from 737 (Ibn Actham al-Kūfī, al-Balādhurī, Ibn al-Athīr and other
authors), they tell us about the saqāliba as «trained slaves,»
and then, of course, follow the data about the saqāliba river,
the main trade route of the region, i.e., the Don and Volga, which were at that
time regarded as one river (because there was a system of portages, not far
from the Stalingrad/Volgograd of today). The river is called nahr
aṣ-ṣaqāliba, meaning not «the river of the Slavs,» but the highway
for the slave-trade. And there are many other data concerning this second meaning
of the word ṣaqāliba «slaves.» But the word ṣaqāliba «slaves»
was well noted in the Umayyad realm, while as far as the West is concerned, the
information we have is from the tenth century, as you correctly mentioned.

One may add that in the letter of Hasdāi b. Šafrūṭ to King
Joseph of Khazaria (also tenth century), Otto, the German Emperor is called melek ṣeqlab, because
he also had that very important commodity—slaves (Hebrew ṣeqlab = Arab ṣaqlab, pl. ṣaqāliba).

Verlinden: In Western sources from the Merovingian
period, I mean hagiographic sources, there are mentions of groups of slaves
that are conducted by merchants coming from the East, but always with no other
terminology than the classical one.